Greedy Goblin

Saturday, February 28, 2009

All the loot is mine!!!

Big Bear Butt wrote about a rogue who organized a VoA pug, inviting no other rogues. That's a pretty effective way to take all the rogue loot without being called a ninja. BBB acknowledges himself that he couldn't do anything against it: "I’m sure they found a replacement for my DPS in about two seconds [I've left]", so the trick works. Why did I not mentioned it yet?

Not because of ethical reasons. Not only I have none, but this case I don't see any problems at all. While BBB calls him selfish asshat, not inviting someone into your raid is absolutely OK. You don't burn their raid ID, they can join other group. You don't lie to anyone, you don't steal from anyone.

I've never used this trick because of my serious limitations. To do the trick as a resto druid, I'd have to exclude other resto druids and holy priests to make sure that all spirit+spellpower stuff land in my hands. The reward is the extra loot. There are two costs though:

At first by turning down able applicants, I elongate the raid forming time. People may get bored and leave while I seek holy paladins and shamans, especially if I'd turn down perfectly good resto druids and priests. On the other hand the rogue in the post did not have this problem. Why? Because "non-rogue DPS" is much more abundant than "resto shaman and holy pally". If 1 able DPS reports in every minute to the 15 DPS spot, 15% of them is rogue than filling the raid takes 15 minutes with rogues and 17:40 to fill without rogues. I doubt if anyone get bored in that 2:40. On the other hand if 1 able healer reports in every 15 minutes (as they use to), to fill the 5 other healer spot takes 1 hour 15 mins taking everyone and 2 hours 30 mins if I turn down priests and trees. (Non-able healers must be turned down as they are useless). No wonder I grab every able tree happily, despite their affinity to roll against me.

Secondly by not taking rogues, you have to overload your raid with non-rogue DPS, for example hunters. If you stack your raid with hunters, some of the hunters can think that his chances for loot decreased greatly and leave. So you have to wait for more people, risking others leaving in boredom, finally destroying your raid. However in the case of DPS this is not a big risk. A hunter, and especially a DK will be happy to get into the raid at all to loot badges and have some (no matter how little) chance to get loot. On the other hand an able holy pally can easily turn me down after finding out we already have 3. He has good chance to get into a raid, and he knows that.

So the rare healers cannot be excluded, the abundant rogues can. This is why I never even thought about this trick to optimize my loot. This is very similar to a real world event: people protesting against immigrants who "take our jobs". It's always low level blue collar workers and unemployed youth on these protests. I've never seen a doctor, engineer or programmer arguing against immigrants. Why? Because they are in short supply, so they perceive the immigrant fellow not as a competitor, but as a relief from overbourden, the same way as I look at fellow trees.

Have you noticed how many healer blogs out there compared to DPS blogs? It seems that we are so nice and friendly to each other while DPS players are selfish and unwelcoming. Of course it's completely wrong. We like each other because we are not competitors, and the rogues hate each other because they are competitors. Remember mixed stereotypes: the only condition that determines how do people perceive your "goodness" is competition status. If you are their competitor, they will find you selfish, evil and hearthless. Big Bear Butt found this rogue evil since he was the competitor of his wife. If his wife would be a mage, my guess is that BBB would not even notice that no rogues are invited.

I hear about it happening all the time, and even people being invited to groups with the condition that they aren't allowed to roll on a particular item that is already "reserved" by someone in the group, but in all my time I have never built a group according to gear I wanted, or excluded someone because I thought they were a threat to my chances at loot.

That's not to say that other people don't think that way, but not everyone thinks about loot first and foremost when choosing group members.

It's much easier to do this for archavon than other raids because all the loot is class specific. So if Gevlon wanted to guarantee he'd get druid loot, all he'd have to do is not invite other druids 9and then hope druid loot dropped). People on my server often organise 10 man 'class' runs where they get one of each class.

To do the trick as a resto druid, I'd have to exclude other resto druids and holy priests to make sure that all spirit+spellpower stuff land in my hands.

Tsss, tsss, tsss, Gevlon. Such sub-standard research isn't like you! As resto druid in a VoA raid you have zero competition for spirit+spellpower stuff from holy druids, because the VoA loot is class specific. Thus if you find that Heroes' Dreamwalker Trousers it's yours, all yours. And if the priest equivalent drops, you can't use it, because it's priest only.

Basically VoA can be done like the old Stratholme "class runs", with one of every class, and no loot conflict.

It was once explained to an English rugby coach that while referees would tend to punish violence they were particularly harsh on violence committed as retaliation. He promptly called his players together and told them to get their retaliation in first.

The way to beat this strategy is to make the raid first.

@Tobold and Spinks while it's true you can do a 10 man VoA class raid I think in this case the Rogue was ensuring he was the only member of his class in VoA25

When I recruit healers for my guild, I'm usually indifferent to their class. I'm perfectly happy to overload on druids, because I know we'll all play enough to get a decent gear set eventually. Maybe it was because I learned my lesson on greed in BC and I'm carefully avoiding it now. We're all greedy, right, but you can choose to ignore those impulses if you'd like. I find that the payout for detaching from the rewards and focusing on the process is pretty good in terms of personal health and sanity.

It does all wash out over the long run!

Except now I've got to recruit resto shaman specifically...ack, there's a hard one on alliance.

I'm a ret pally and my bf is a rogue. If he is in a group and I don't get invited, so be it. If I'm in a group and he doesn't get invited, so be it. I enjoy playing with him and like for him to get gear, but we don't ask the other to sacrifice their enjoyment for ours.

if you had read his blog long enough and didn't scip some essentials, you'd see that he most probably DIDN'T exclude any other rogues from the runs. (there was this something about losing multiple rolls on trinkets etc)

Sometimes I feel like BB might just be too good to be true and your sears phychology doesn't explain his reaction in a slightest. he didn't think that the guy was evil because he was a competition for his wife, on the contrary. the guy was evil because he was trying to stack his odds instead of giving one and all a fair chance. he would have felt the same exact way if his wife was a mage. he might not have noticed it right away, but he would have felt exactly the same.

I know its a difficult concept for some of you to grasp becasue you judge based on your own perception, but some people actualy have self imposed moral code that they stick to and that moral code is not always based on self interest and profit/loss.

I admire BBB for sticking to his principles even if it means that he might lose here and there. I admire him even more, becasue I know myself that i'm to selfish to ever be able to live by his code

On my server some DK tried the same trick. My Holy paladin left his raid three times (getting invited by someone and then noticed him being Masterlooter). At least one time this caused the raid to be canceled. It made my day :D

I agree with you that the rogue can set up his PUG raid however he wants to. However I do think that he was being very rude in one regard in particular: he was wasting people's time by not being upfront about his "no rogues" rule. The rogue deserves a bad reputation for this reason alone.

He should have advertised this unusual rule upfront, rather than try to keep it a secret. It's the "wasting people's time" that is the quantitative measure here - only people who wouldn't have joined if they knew about the rule, and hung around for a while before leaving after discovering the rule, are affected.

Also, you can tell he's the sort of person that would put some pixels and epeen over the feelings of others. But that's his choice to make, just like it's everyone's choice whether to play the game.

Not going to comment on the rogue because I don't see a problem with building a group around getting a certain piece of loot. I try not to take 2 of the same class or even armor types when building a group for heroics to eliminate drama.

I wanted to note though that I find what you started to say about healers vs dps. I usually find I'm in a team when I'm healing as opposed to when I'm dps to where I am in direct competition. DPS will allways be fighting for the #1 spot but as a Disc priest I could careless about #1 on healing meters.

I was in 2 runs this weekend started by some rogue doing the exact same thing. One VoA, and one OS, both 25-man.

He was up front about it in the group, so everyone knew what he was doing, and I didn't see any complaining.

IF the person is up front about it, I don't really see a problem, but that might also be because rogue's aren't topping the charts like they used to. And unless they are needed to calm the adds in OS, would anyone notice? It would be a lot harder to exclude some other classes.

I recently joined a H Sarth pug where the rogue was trying to hand-pick the team to minimize competition for the gloves token (which meant trying not to get not only other rogues, but druids, death knights and mages). He only invited me (another rogue) after I confirmed I already had the gloves myself and therefore wouldn't roll on them.

Anyhow, we bring down H Sarth, and both tokens are Vanquisher tokens (Rogue / Druid / DK / Mage). They're rolled on, and the rogue in question wins neither. However, the rogue ninjas himself one of the tokens.

One of the group tries to excuse that behavior by saying that since he setup the pug, he's entitled to the gloves. I'm inclined to disagree - he didn't state up front that he was reserving the token if it drops - and if you don't reserve loot up front than the implied rules of whoever rolls highest gets the goodies is applicable.

And this also goes to warn that if someone wants something enough to go to the effort of organizing a group to get it, they might also be prepared to go as far as ninjaing it (although this is probably less of an issue if all competition can be eliminated).